Print 2010 – 2015
Unspeakable (draft version)
Etching and pastel on paper, 46 x 38cm
In this hybrid etching and pastel drawing the figure is situated behind the eyes at a remove from the audience to suggest an interior condition and position. There is a link to body armouring of trauma – the body keeping the score being a familiar term in psychology. It seems that the condition was linked to embodied trauma and these women did not have a voice either in their treatment or in society – they were only able to express this in a non-verbal communication – in the guise of illness.
Grand Locks
Etching and aquatint
41 x 35cm
Edition 40
SIMON
2022
‘Returning Home’ opening 28th October – 5th November 2022 @chqdublin.
‘Returning Home’ is a charity exhibition of fine art prints from 48 members of @graphicstudiodublin and is a collaboration with @simoncommunity, kindly supported by HLB Ireland.
2021
‘The Art of Home’ opens Monday 4th- Saturday 9th October 2021, 10am- 6:30pm at @CHQ Dublin, Custom House Quay, Dublin 1.
‘The Art of Home’ is an exhibition of fine art prints from 41 members of Graphic Studio Dublin with Simon Communities of Ireland. Proceeds will be split 50/50 with the artists and Simon Communities helping to promote the solutions that will bring an end to homelessness in Ireland.
Magic Seeds
Magic seeds planting instructions:
Best time to plant: Toss out your window on a full moon night
Maturity: Overnight
“Dear Santa can I have some magic seeds to grow a tree and some wood to build a treehouse…”
So began my daughter’s letter to Santa many years ago…I can assure you that this was not a test of faith, this was for real and the sentiment encapsulated all that is magical about treehouses and their hold on the imagination.
In the hierarchy of dens, a treehouse holds the loftiest position, a natural and ambitious progression from cushion and blanket constructions. A treehouse allows for passwords, codes and rules to be invoked and amended, a place to act out independent belonging. It is a home/haven outside of family convention…a little walk on the wild side.
Treehouses follow a unique aesthetic – they should look rough and ready, imperfect but also solid, a little dangerous and difficult to get into and most importantly somewhere you could hide away from sight.
The first print I made was an etching of my destined for destruction treehouse, precariously situated in a diseased Dutch elm in our back garden. That I was eighteen at the time goes to show how big a part it played in my childhood. Likewise the treehouse that answered my daughter’s letter sits perched on stilts in our treeless back garden and has since found its way into her paintings…nowadays it is just a shell of its former self, rotten in places and to some neighbours perhaps a bit of an eyesore but no one has the heart to dismantle it just yet.
Do you think I think so
Episode 16 – Eumaeus
Etching and aquatint
46 x 38cm
Edition 18
2022 marks 100 years since James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses was published in its entirety. To celebrate this, The Graphic Studio Dublin invited 18 visual artists, to each make an original print, responding to one of the 18 episodes in the book under the title Ulysses Imagined.
I was immediately drawn to the reference to shelter in this episode; the cab shelter inside which the story unfolds and its counterpart of Eumaeus’ hut. Within this protective space the characters appear to be hiding something from each other, be it their true identity or intentions so I am also thinking of pretence, theatrics and masquerade.
The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by Nuala O’Connor, set in letterpress. Celebrated author of Nora. O’Connor’s book, published in 2021, imagines Joyce’s home life, through the eyes of his wife Nora Barnacle. The book was chosen as this year’s read for One Dublin, One Book initiative.
Joyce’s famous novel has inspired many different artists since its publication: writers, musicians and visual artists. This exhibition gives 18 printmakers the opportunity to create a work using an episode from Ulysses as a starting point. The resulting prints, in a wide variety of techniques, illustrate how art of the past inspires art of the future. A line from Nuala O’Connor’s text alludes to that continuum:
‘We loop into infinity, eating ourselves and each other, the end in our beginning and the beginning in our end’.
The exhibition is curated in collaboration with Anne Hodge, National Gallery of Ireland along with Peter Brennan and Mateja Smic of Graphic Studio Gallery.